15 February 2019

The Banking Royal Commission’s final report was released recently with 76 recommendations. Among them, the report has set out in detail how and when so-called processing or administrative ‘errors’ veer into misleading or deceptive conduct and the need for corporations to have in place processes that avoid these systemic errors. The report also recommends that there should be one person in every bank that is responsible for the design and implementation of each product, keeping it fit for purpose, and if something goes wrong, remediating it. This implies having specific senior executive owning each of the enterprise processes, designing controls for these processes, and overseeing these checks and controls ensuring they are working without failure.

26 October 2017

This is a simple info-graphic illustrating several emerging concepts and practices, including big data, predictive analytics and machine learning, with relation to decision management, business process management and business operations.

14 May 2016

A presentation by Trisotect on its new tools based on the OMG's standards - OMM, BPMN, DMN, CMMN - that facilitates in building of new holistic business models to support an enterprise digital transformation.

17 March 2016

Another reason for adopting of BPMN. The BPMN Model Interchange Working Group (BPMN MIWG) held its 4th BPMN interchange capability demonstration. This demonstration involved several BPMN software vendors collaborating to create a BPMN model and then have it execute on various BPMN based business process engines. BTW unless the BPMN process model as developed in accordance to the standard, it defeats many key purposes of BPMN, including interchangeability and executability. Enjoy the demo.

09 December 2014

A joint presentation by Dr Gero Decker of Signavio and Dr Jurgen Pitschke of BCS on business decision management and business process management with examples of decision modelling using DMN that is associated with business rule task in a BPMN process model.

Try Out DMN Decision Modelling

For a 30 days trial of Signavio which has a Decision modelling module based on OMG' DMN, [click here].

24 September 2014

Having shared the concepts in Decision Model & Notation (DMN) from OMG and how it supports business rules task in BPMN Process Model, let look at the potentials between another business rules related specification, Semantics Of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR), also from OMG.

23 September 2014

Early this year, OMG released the beta version of its Decision Model & Notation (DMN), a complimentary notation to work alongside BPMN for modelling of operational decision and business rules. Similar to BPMN, it aims to support designing of decision models, providing guided operational decision and potentially automation of operational decision. This article provides an introduction to the basic concepts of DMN, its constructs, illustration of decision model and decision logic expression particularly the DMN Decision Table.

11 September 2014

“Of course I’m data driven. I take the data and I use that as an input to my final decision-making process.” A very common statement to many managers and so called knowledge workers. Is combining data and intuition a good idea in decision making? What would be the impact of taking operational decision and/or business rules management to the next stage with "thinking machine"?

The McKinsey Quarterly article, "Artificial intelligence meets the C-suite" explores the impact that “thinking” machines may have on top-management roles with experts including the authors of "The Second Machine Age", Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Enjoy the read.

With predictive analytic and the massive data, a true data-driven decision making would improve the decision making outcome. And business rules management and operational decision management are the low hanging fruits taking advantage of the advancement in AI fields.

On the other hand, having a badly developed business rules and decision models could escalate the problem in multi folds. The automated scheduling case of Starbucks mentioned in Wharton Management article - Can a Robot Be Your Boss? - is a good example or poor decision model. The (data-driven) algorithm probably only considered the demand side and not taking into account of the supply side rules. In fact it is also a case that shows the importance of operational decision management and athe potential consequence for lack of it.

Well, our knowledge workers could finally working on the creative and innovative side of works and also focusing on the human side providing motivation to staff members, rather than trying to combine intuition with data driven in decision making. "It still matters a great deal to have a good boss, and it is still one of the worst things in the workplace to have a bad one.”

09 September 2014

"In a day and age where the automation of operational business decisions is increasingly the goal, I maintain that knowledge worker is the wrong term for business process modeling. The term is simply too broad. Instead I use the terms white-collar worker and gold-collar worker," Ronald Ross, 2014.

There has been a long discussion and debates about who is a knowledge worker and what type of job constitute a knowledge worker. Despite the term “knowledge worker” was first coined by Peter Drucker in 1959 , it has over time carries diverse meaning to different people. Here are two quotes from Peter Drucker on the term.

“Every knowledge worker in a modern organization is an executive if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.” The Effective Executive, 1966.

“Finally, these new industries differ from the traditional modern industry in that they will employ predominantly knowledge workers rather than manual workers.” The Age of Discontinuity, 1969

The term becomes even more vague when it was adopted by the IT industry. According to an IBM article (IBM Systems Journal, “Ethnographic Study of Collaborative Knowledge Work”, Volume 45, Number 4, 2006), knowledge worker was described as someone who adds value in the workplace by processing existing information to create new information which can be used to define and solve problems. Some examples given in that article include managers, salespeople, nurses, doctors, lawyers, judges, and analysts.

Now my view of knowledge worker and the nature of today’s office workers - what Ross described as the white-collar workers.

The advancement in knowledge representation in the field of artificial intelligence and knowledge management has enabled many knowledge to be represented in a well formed structure, such as decision models and business rules. What was once domain expert knowledge could now be explicitly expressed in structured pieces of interdependent information. With such methods (and technologies) coming of age, it is time to seriously consider the differentiation of the “information worker” (white-collar) to that of the “knowledge worker” (gold-collar). In a LinkedIn discussion, it is generally agreed that a knowledge worker is the one that improvise and create knowledge such as policies and business rules, and not the one that applies these policies or business rules. Hence most of today’s office workers are NOT knowledge workers per se.

Another extreme example I like to use is carpenter making a cabinet. Before the days of mass production and assembly line, a carpenter would be viewed as a “knowledge worker”. Even the passing of the knowledge is through master and apprentice nature. Today probably only the designer is the knowledge work left where the rest are repetitive works in manufacturing. IMO that type of changes (evolution of work nature) is similarly happening to jobs in the service industry in recent decades, turning some of the knowledge type works to become information works (assembly line of information).

John Morris's remark about the unionism movement is a summary of the economics dimension on the skills question.

"The history of unionism in both Europe and North America is documented as significantly involving struggles over control of work processes and factory floors. In the beginning, factories would only run because well-trained apprentices or journeyman could be relied upon to bring their knowledge with them. Some would have it that management’s desire for control was a motivator for the de-skilling that may have taken place over the past 100 years. However, others hold that such a position suggests that control is a value in and of itself, and that de-skilling only happened in pursuit of profits. Regardless, all these debates are moot now with the anticipated massive wave of automation," John Morris, 2014.

In short the transfer of implicit knowledge to explicit knowledge is definitely following the similar trend in office works.

28 April 2014

It is amazing to see the hundreds of birds flying in a flock. As individual birds, they seem to fly in all directions but acting and behaving as one entity - the flock - well coordinated and fully fluid.

The massive interaction and communication between neighbouring birds allows the perfect coordination of flight direction and flight speed of the flock. Such a perfect orchestration of individual entities toward a common goal, providing a larger but agile singular entity.

There is a lot to learn from nature if organisation is to coordinate its participants across business functions into a perfect orchestration of enterprise processes and choreography of inter-enterprise processes.

20 February 2014

After looking at the purpose of business function in the previous post and types of organisational structure, in this article I will share some cases of process improvement or BPM projects focusing only within the boundary of business function or functional silo and its potential consequences.

16 February 2014

It is common as BPM practitioner to come across the many terms used in other disciplines such as enterprise architecture and business architecture, that are overlapping with terminologies in BPM practice. At times there are same 'words' that may be representing different aspects of the same elements. This article revisits the fundamental component of an organisation - Business Function. And also using business function to peek into organisational structure - a critical part of organisational transformation.

02 November 2013

If you are not aware, the OMG Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 is now an official ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 19510:2013) for modelling business process. It is definitely another milestone for the BPMN 2.0 and BPMN itself since its first release by BPMI in 2004. Read more on the history of BPMN.

27 October 2013

When discussing business process, there is always the confusion on what constitutes a business process. This is not about the boundary of your process model. It is about whether the term "business process" is inclusive of human resource, finance, tools or even time. This article provides the key difference between process of Enterprise Architecture (EA) / Business Architecture (BA) and process based on Business Process Management (BPM).

18 October 2013

Moving from the process improvement methods and the challenges in previous article, this article explores two of the building blocks for business process management (BPM) - organizational transformation and BPM technologies - particularly how BPM technologies support the effort in continuous process improvement. Again, as building blocks they are interdependent and work in synergy, not in isolation.

17 October 2013

Business process improvement (BPI) aims at improving the effectiveness, efficiency and adaptability of the day-to-day business operation. BPI initiatives that focus on individual business function ignoring the end-to-end business process may end up having detrimental effect on the overall business performance. In addition, it is not uncommon to see BPI projects running in isolation to other business and technology transformation efforts. Such BPI initiatives could achieve short term improvement but a challenge to maintain and sustain continuous process improvement in the organization. The adoption of business process management (BPM), a collection of methods, policies, metrics, roles and technologies, is critical both as an operational and technology strategies to meet the dynamic environments business is in today. These methods, policies, metrics, roles and technologies can be grouped into four key categories of building blocks for adopting BPM – organisational transformation, process improvement, performance measurement, and BPM technologies. As building blocks, they are interdependent and work in synergy. This article explore one of these building blocks, the process improvement methods and the challenges.

20 September 2013

Having looked at RAD, EPC and BPMN process diagrams in previous article, let look at other graphical representations for business processes which are around for quite some times. They are definitely the ancestors of process flow diagrams but still well and popular.

18 September 2013

In several discussions I have had about process modelling methods, the methods being discussed are the types of notation or graphical notation used to represent business processes. The notations are always a topic of contention among business process modellers and practitioners. This is the first article of a series attempting to show with simple examples some of the commonly used business process modelling notations.

15 September 2013

This is Part 4 of a series of articles introducing the common process patterns depicted using BPMN 2.0 elements. It is the last part covering common patterns on multi instances process patterns and deferred choice pattern. The less common process patterns are not covered in the series.

13 September 2013

This is Part 3 of a series of articles introducing the common process patterns depicted using BPMN 2.0 elements. From the basic patterns in Part 1, advanced branching and synchronization patterns in Part 2, the article looks at the structural process patterns.